Two of the most important trade policy developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of preferential trade agreements and...

What features of the dispute settlement process help governments live up to their trade liberalization commitments? Exploiting data on GATT/WTO trade disputes initiated and completed between 1973 and 1998, this paper identifies economic and institutional determinants that help defendant...

The poorest WTO member countries almost universally fail to engage as either complainants or interested third parties in formal dispute settlement activity related to their market access interests. This paper focuses on costs of the WTO's extended litigation process as an explanation for the...

Since the 1995 inception of the World Trade Organization (WTO), developing countries have become some of the most frequent users of the WTO-sanctioned antidumping (AD) trade policy instrument. This paper exploits newly available data to examine sector-level use of nine of the major "new user"...

Poor countries are rarely challenged in formal World Trade Organization trade disputes for failing to live up to commitments, reducing the benefits of their participation in international trade agreements. This paper examines the political-economic causes of the failure to challenge poor...

This paper introduces a new data set and establishes a set of basic facts and patterns regarding the ‘trade’ that countries fight about under WTO dispute settlement. It characterizes the scope of products, as well as the levels of and changes to the trade values, market shares, volumes, and...

First Japan and more recently China have pursued export-oriented growth strategies. While other Asian countries have done likewise, Japan and China are of particular interest because their economies are so large and the size of the associated bilateral trade imbalances with the United States so...